Postmodernism

First published Fri Sep 30, 2005; substantive revision Thu Feb 5, 2015
That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can be described as a
set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as
difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize
other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty,
and the univocity of meaning.

The term “postmodernism” first entered the philosophical lexicon in 1979, with
the publication of The Postmodern Condition by Jean-François Lyotard. I
therefore give Lyotard pride of place in the sections that follow. An economy of
selection dictated the choice of other figures for this entry. I have selected only
those most commonly cited in discussions of philosophical postmodernism, five
French and two Italian, although individually they may resist common
affiliation. Ordering them by nationality might duplicate a modernist schema
they would question, but there are strong differences among them, and these
tend to divide along linguistic and cultural lines. The French, for example, work
with concepts developed during the structuralist revolution in Paris in the 1950s
and early 1960s, including structuralist readings of Marx and Freud. For this
reason they are often called “poststructuralists.” They also cite the events of
May 1968 as a watershed moment for modern thought and its institutions,
especially the universities. The Italians, by contrast, draw upon a tradition of
aesthetics and rhetoric including figures such as Giambattista Vico and
Benedetto Croce. Their emphasis is strongly historical, and they exhibit no
fascination with a revolutionary moment. Instead, they emphasize continuity,
narrative, and difference within continuity, rather than counter-strategies and
discursive gaps. Neither side, however, suggests that postmodernism is an attack
upon modernity or a complete departure from it. Rather, its differences lie within
modernity itself, and postmodernism is a continuation of modern thinking in
another mode.

Finally, I have included a summary of Habermas's critique of postmodernism,

representing the main lines of discussion on both sides of the Atlantic. Habermas
argues that postmodernism contradicts itself through self-reference, and notes
that postmodernists presuppose concepts they otherwise seek to undermine, e.g.,
freedom, subjectivity, or creativity. He sees in this a rhetorical application of
strategies employed by the artistic avant-garde of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, an avant-garde that is possible only because modernity separates
artistic values from science and politics in the first place. On his view,
postmodernism is an illicit aestheticization of knowledge and public discourse.
Against this, Habermas seeks to rehabilitate modern reason as a system of
procedural rules for achieving consensus and agreement among communicating
subjects. Insofar as postmodernism introduces aesthetic playfulness and
subversion into science and politics, he resists it in the name of a modernity
moving toward completion rather than self-transformation.